Chance Came In And Tore You (Back)
by TrisakAminawn
Summary: Red Robin is out on a perfectly ordinary patrol, when he discovers he's being tailed by a...little bird. [A 'The Till-Then From the Ever-Since' mini-prequel, detailing the arrival of Small Tim Drake.]


**Chance Came In And Tore You (Back)**

 ** _A/N:_** _This is a Till-Then tie-in chapter to the prompt,_ _"how did tim and tim figure out that the younger ones are tethered to the older ones in The Till-Then? ("It's us younger ones that are tethered..." in chapter 8.)"_

 _Chapter 25 should be out fairly soon now that I've got this sorted out. Sorry I am such a slooooooow._

* * *

Tim lowered his binoculars.

The fight he'd seen shaping up along the waterfront had resolved itself, which was nice to see but meant he really needed to get back on patrol. He and Steph and Bruce were out tonight, which was enough force to handle anything short of a major crisis, but that didn't mean he could slack off. There was always more to do.

He always missed Gotham when he went away, but sometimes he wondered why, when he came back.

His patrol route for tonight swung west, out of the stockyards and into the industrial area, and then back toward residential. It was sort of grueling in the wintertime because it covered a lot of ground without much in the way of chances to warm up, but it wasn't usually challenging–there were little scuffles like the one he'd almost intervened in and other minor problems sometimes, but mostly there weren't many _people_ out here at night, so anything you did find tended to be serious. Complex schemes and major villains, hiding out.

That was _why_ they patrolled this area, because otherwise there'd be no one to notice when an old warehouse turned into a headquarters or a factory was converted for some nefarious purpose. But if you didn't run into any of that, odds were you wouldn't run into anything.

It made it hard to keep up any sense of urgency on this route, but if you maintained a sense of urgency at all times you'd just go crazy. Dick wasn't actually wrong about that.

The next roof west was only three feet higher than this one, and ten feet away. Tim bet himself he could make it without a grapple. He'd just give himself a bit of a run-up, and….

Nailed it.

"Guah!"

Tim spun, staff telescoping to full length in his hand, at the startled sound, coming from _much_ closer than anyone had any business being when he'd thought he was alone. To find a small figure mostly covered in a black cape, having evidently fallen facefirst over the decorative cornice at the far side of the roof he'd just left. Flashes of color showed from under the cape–leaf-green, blood-red, canary yellow.

 _Robin._

There was only a split second where Tim's brain told him it was Damian–snuck away from his _special bonding time with Dick_ to harass Tim, a stupidly plausible and profoundly infuriating scenario–followed by another split second of wild seesawing emotion at the revelation that after three years, he now equated Robin so completely with Damian that he expected anyone in a Robin suit to be the little monster, no matter how firmly all other cues spoke against that.

Then he put all that behind him and focused on what _was_. A dark-haired child, stealthy enough to watch Red Robin from a hidden spot on the same rooftop, clumsy enough to trip, goofy enough to make a ridiculous noise when he did so.

Brash enough to stalk a Bat while dressed up as a Robin.

Tim's chest hurt, and he clenched his teeth and set that aside too. It had been over a second. The kid was pulling himself together, hands under chest, about to get up.

"Maybe go back to gymnastics class." He planted the butt of his staff on tar paper. "The position has been filled."

The kid popped upright, onto his knees, outrage written all over him.

Tim recognized the costume before the person.

That was ridiculous, possibly, but they were over a hundred feet apart, and the boy was wearing a mask, and he'd studied and memorized the costume with much more attention than he had the face.

 _My suit,_ he thought, a possessive clench going through him because he'd labored over that design, him and Alfred, practical adjustments and stylistic embellishments, everything it took to make a Robin that was _his_ , was Batman's partner without trying to step into Jason's place.

The green tights were especially distinctive. In retrospect they looked a little garish, but considering what they'd been replacing they'd been a pretty square choice.

"Yeah!" the Robin in his costume said. "By me!"

And Tim did know the voice.

He didn't _believe_ it instantly, but he listened to himself more carefully than he looked, and he'd heard recordings often enough to compensate for the difference outside your head.

He squinted. He opened his mouth, slightly. Closed it again.

He wanted to say, this is a trick. But who would _bother_ with this kind of trick? A tolerable number of enemies had some knowledge or suspicion that Red Robin had been the Robin before the crazy stabby one, and most of the Justice League knew exactly who Tim was. Most of them hadn't met him at this age. The list of people with the _knowledge and capacity_ to do this was very short even before you looked for motive. But why impersonate Tim _to Tim?_ He of all people obviously knew it wasn't him.

The way their lives worked, a prepubescent version of someone popping up and being endearingly childish might very well be able to convince everyone he'd been de-aged, and that might actually be a good dodge in some circumstances for getting in an infiltrator, since being the wrong age could cover for a variety of errors that might ruin an attempt at a more subtle replacement, and natural protectiveness would bias adults in the ringer's favor.

But it didn't make sense to try that against the party being replaced. And if you were going to use one of the former Robins get close to Batman, you wouldn't pick Tim.

Tim sharpened all his senses, scouring the nearby roofs for any of the signature hints of hologram technology or concealment devices. It was always possible the child himself was the entire ambush, of course.

He wasn't close enough to do much ambushing, unless he pulled a gun, though who knew what was under the cape. The kid had folded his arms now, so he could be palming practically anything.

On the other hand, he'd just _fallen flat on his face_ , but too much caution was usually better than too little.

"Who are you supposed to be?" The boy was doing his best to sound authoritative. His best was pretty good, considering he was about thirteen, but it gave Tim retroactive embarrassment anyway. He remembered Shiva roasting him, on that ridiculous adventure they'd wound up on when he was just starting out, for being a typical arrogant white man. She'd been letting him off easy; she could have pointed out he was a precocious _little boy_ merely _attempting_ to be a typical arrogant white man.

He snorted softly. "Guess."

The Robin's masked eyes shuttled up and down, stuck on the hawk's-head insignia, and back up at the cowl. "Batbird?"

Tim snorted again, this time trying not to laugh.

The child's mouth twitched, and he moved froward a bit across the roof, enough that they could speak at a more reasonable volume. "Seriously, though. Batman doesn't have a lot of patience for freelance vigilantes in his town."

"He knows better than to try to stop me." It was a joke, but it was true, too.

Robin put his eyebrows up. He was a really _good_ mimic.

"You make it sound like I should've heard of you," he said, "but man, if I should have heard of you I _would_ have heard of you."

"Why don't you call Batman and ask?" Tim said.

Robin scowled, suddenly. "You know I can't."

"I do know," Tim agreed. "But I'm kind of surprised to hear you admit it." If he was going to pretend to be Tim to Tim in the first place, why stop?

"What's the point in pretending I haven't noticed you've jammed my radio?"

And…that was even more surprising.

If he hadn't been the spitting image of Tim at that age, Red Robin would have taken this for a real child who urgently wanted to be Robin and might have some actual talent. It sort of hurt.

"Like I said, go practice some more," he said. Aggravating someone into breaking character was a tried and true method. "You can't have a Robin who trips over his own feet."

"I didn't trip!"

"Mm- _hm_."

That was the weird part, honestly. Because Tim wasn't egotistical enough to pretend he'd never fallen flat on his face in his life. He was very aware he didn't have Dick's natural grace or Jason's ridiculous reflexes, or for that matter Damian's weirdly acute proprioception. Let alone Cass' perfection of motion.

But he wasn't a klutz, either, and he'd snuck around Gotham spying on Batman and Robin without getting himself noticed for a while without any formal stealth and maneuver training. A perfect replication of himself in his first year or so as Robin shouldn't have tripped over itself like that. But otherwise he hadn't noticed any flaws.

"I didn't." The tiny Tim Drake narrowed masked eyes up at him. "Are you going to come clean or am I going to have to beat some truth out of you?"

Red Robin couldn't help finding this funny. "I'd say I'd love to see you try it but you know what, I have a patrol to finish."

And just to see what the little mystery did about it, he turned and sprinted toward the far end of his roof.

"Wait, _no-!"_ The mystery kid shouted, with such real alarm Tim glanced back over his shoulder as he went. In time to see Robin pitch straight over the edge and into the ten-foot gap between buildings, arms pinwheeling desperately.

It made him a sucker, he was aware, but he dashed back anyway. Made it to the edge in time to see his tiny doppelganger finish using a desperate combination of kick-flips back and forth across the gap and his own telescoping bo staff to slow his descent enough to hit the ground seventy feet down in an uninjured crouch.

He stayed there, seemingly gathering his breath and affirming that he had actually survived, before standing up and tipping his head back to aim another look at Red Robin on the edge of the building above. "How are you _doing_ that?" he demanded.

…Tim was starting to believe this was not a nefarious infiltration scheme. At least, not one the kid knew about.

He threw out a grapple and dropped down to join Robin on the ground. "You said I was blocking your comms," he said. "What did you mean?"

Robin studied him, trying to decide whether to treat it as a serious question. "I tried to contact Batman after you popped up. It didn't go through."

Hm. Experimentally, Tim engaged his own comm. "Status?" he asked.

"Clear," grunted Bruce in his ear. It sounded like he was in the middle of a fistfight, though evidently not a serious one, so Tim left him alone for now. The important thing was that he was still there. He closed the comm line. Looked down at the boy, and his dubious expression.

Of course, if this was time travel he _wouldn't_ be able to get through to anybody. They updated their encryptions regularly. They weren't even using the same comm system anymore.

Tim asked, "What about Agent A?"

Robin shook his head. His posture had changed, because Alfred's code name wasn't bandied around enough to be known about much outside their own circles. Red Robin had just tagged himself either an insider or a truly dedicated stalker, not just a random interloper on the cape scene.

"Oracle?" It was Barbara's night off, he _shouldn't_ be able to reach her, but if anyone was impersonating her to this little Robin it was possible they didn't know that.

"Who _are_ you?"

Red Robin planted the end of his staff in the dirt, mirroring Robin's stance without even having to make an effort to imitate it, because that was still one of the most natural ways for him to stand. He was more than a foot taller, and he'd filled out a little more, but really, he hadn't changed that much. Even with a cowl over his hair, it wasn't impossible to tell. "Do you really have to ask?"

Gazing up at him, Robin shook his head very slightly—another person might have wondered whether this meant _no, you're right, I don't_ or _no,_ _I don't believe what you're_ _suggesting_ , but Tim knew it was both.

"How much did you notice?" Red Robin asked. "I'm surprised you didn't head straight back to the Cave when you couldn't connect." At that age he'd still been anxiously, justifiably worried about Bruce's wellbeing, and concerned about making sure Bruce _didn't_ have to worry about him, which hadn't exactly made him careful but had occasionally made him protectively clingy.

Not that keeping eyes on the person he suspected of nefarious intent didn't sound like him, too. He wouldn't have wanted to lose track of the suspect.

"Prove it." That grip, that shift in his weight—Robin was prepared to unleash the full extent of his abilities in the attempt to neutralize him the second he decided he was a threat.

He still had that bad habit of leading with his left foot even when it weakened the strike, because when people weren't expecting it, it gave him better odds of getting through their guard. Not a bad tactic, but bad to fall back on every time. His gauntlets weren't optimized for gripping the staff yet, either. Tim knew exactly how to disarm his little self in one move.

"Shiva didn't teach you all there is to know about staff work, you know," Tim told himself. Both because she hadn't had time, within the scope of their training, and because she didn't know it all herself—it was hardly her specialty, as incredibly skilled as she was at combat.

Of course this did not constitute proof. It wasn't widely known the third Robin had studied under Shiva, but it was hardly a secure secret—Shiva herself could have told anybody, for one thing.

He sighed.

"Before I gave Dick back the pictures I stole from his album right before I became Robin," he said, "I made copies."

Robin's mouth twisted, and Tim kept talking.

"I still thought it was going to be a one-time thing then, stepping into my heroes' lives to convince them to look after each other with Jason gone. I wanted a souvenir. That was why I took them at all, instead of just snooping to track him down, which was maybe wrong but done with good intentions. I don't have any good excuse for that part. It was selfish."

He'd always been selfish, he knew that. Wanting his parents to change their lives and personalities to accommodate him. Seizing the opportunity to live a childhood daydream, when he realized his plan to get Dick to help Bruce through his grief wasn't going to work out even if they reconciled, and he didn't know anybody else to ask. Giving everything he had to being good enough as Robin because _he_ couldn't bear letting anyone down. All that time trying to get Steph to stop risking her life in the field because he'd blame himself if she got killed, and he'd encouraged her. Trying to clone Kon just to have him back. Expecting Dick to forgive him for pressuring him into becoming Batman, and be his partner. _Selfish._

Even when he risked his life for people he cared about, wasn't he secretly hoping that if he proved himself enough times he'd deserve to have them care just as much? Wasn't it just a ploy for attention, at heart?

He hated that childish, needy self-centered core of him sometimes, especially the way no matter how disciplined and logical and impartial he tried to be it wormed its way back in and started affecting his decisionmaking, but here and now he found he _couldn't_ hate the thirteen-year-old kid on the cusp of the true challenges of his life, staring up at him. Couldn't even hate that need in him.

It was okay, wasn't it? For a child to want to be taken care of? That was forgivable, wasn't it. And seeing this new-minted Robin from the outside, he was so clearly…just a child.

"You could have figured that out," said the little Robin, who had never told that to anyone. "The copies are with the other stuff, _under my bed._ " Not exactly the Fort Knox of hiding places, it was true.

"Do you think I did?"

The child Tim had a thinky face on, lips pursed and dragged to one side. "…no," he admitted at last.

"Okay," Tim said, and then waited, because he obviously wasn't done.

"But, hey. Pop quiz time." The Robin with his voice was grinning, a wicked teasing thing that looked a lot goofier but also a lot more charming than he'd always figured he did. "A few years ago—my time, obviously—I used to sneak off into the attics at boarding school for alone time sometimes. What did I do with the big stuffed great horned owl somebody'd stored up there on top of a grandfather clock?"

Tim closed his eyes, longsuffering. He wasn't actually all that embarrassed. He wouldn't even be embarrassed, really, if people found out—he'd been ten, it was the kind of thing a ten year old _did._ But heaven forbid Damian learned. _He'd_ been the kind of ten-year-old that casually dismembered his enemies and spat in death's eyes.

"I used to pretend it was Batman," he said. "I'd reenact scenes from action movies. Or imagine Batman was in trouble and Robin couldn't help, so I had to step in." He'd felt bad about those games, a few years later, when Jason _really_ couldn't help. But not so bad he hadn't fallen back on their premise when he'd run out of other ideas, and Dick and Bruce's comms went out in an exploding building.

There had been a few times he'd seen them in need of a hand in reality, even before what had happened to Jason, during summers and other vacations back in Gotham, when he started following them on patrol. He'd never stepped in like he had in his attic pretend games, with a grin and a one-liner to bask in Batman's gratitude, because he wasn't _stupid_. He'd been entirely aware that putting an eighty-pound eleven-year-old with a white belt in karate into the middle of a fight would pretty much _always_ pose more of an obstacle to Batman and Robin than it would to anyone they were fighting.

"What did I do that time I saw Batman go down to Killer Croc while Robin was out of town?" he asked, a final test.

Robin was grinning again. "In real life? I threw a brick through a window." That momentary distraction had been all Bruce needed to turn the tables. "And what did I do that time Batman and Robin both got caught trying to infiltrate Poison Ivy's lair?"

Tim realized he was grinning back. "I called the cops. And you're in that suit now because Batman…"

"Needs a Robin," finished the kid, with all the grounded certainty of saying something he both knew and believed.

Red Robin put out a hand, and little Robin in his softer glove took it. "Welcome to the future. Let's go get to the bottom of this."


End file.
